Friends like these

TKP 17/8/2009

It is always difficult for a Nepali prime minister on trips to New Delhi to maintain the appearance that he has the power to engage India on equal terms. For Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, this will be even more difficult than usual. For one, New Delhi played a major role in creating the conditions that enabled his ascent to the highest office, and India will thus expect him to remain beholden to it. In addition, his backing within the country is not as solid as it should be. Ministers within his own government have being making efforts to undermine him — most recently Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala, ostensibly gone to Delhi to prepare for his visit, instead made blatant attempts at self promotion at the prime minister’s expense. There are also divisions within his own party, with a major section unhappy with the prime minister’s actions and desiring an alternative course, perhaps under an alternative leadership. Then there are the challenges of holding together a diverse governing coalition, and the task of having to deal with Maoist attempts to topple the government.


With his domestic base insecure, Prime Minister’s Nepal’s chief purpose in New Delhi is to receive renewed assurances that India will continue to support the government he leads and has no plans to prop up an alternate governing coalition in the near future. All signs indicate that he will be successful in this purpose. Although there are doubts in the Indian establishment about the efficacy of the current government, Delhi wishes to exclude the Maoists from all power for the near future, and in order to do this Madhav Nepal’s government must be kept in place and strengthened. 
So our prime minister will be feted, the Indian government’s munificence will be displayed through promises of roads, transmission lines and other goodies. But while this may make our prime minister happy in private, he will have anxieties that if unable to maintain at least a semblance of parity with Nepal’s influential neighbour, he will appear as the leader of a client state gone to pay tribute to the powers at the heart of empire. 
This has been the dilemma of every post-1990 Nepali prime minister gone to visit India. The highest dream of all Nepali leaders when it comes to our foreign relations is to be able to negotiate an agreement with Delhi that will earn them respect in India and accolades back home. Usually this involves negotiations towards the joint creation of a hydropower project on Nepali soil, in which the task for the Nepali delegation is to gain the maximum benefit possible. This is a task fraught with dangers. Nepal can hardly match the shrewdness of the Indian negotiating side. Even if we do manage to extract significant concessions, suspicion of India runs so high that at sections back home will not fail to denounce the prime minister for “giving away the country’s resources.”


But this has not stopped successive Nepali prime ministers from attempting to attain this Holy Grail. Even Madhav Nepal, who in awareness of his fractured domestic constituency has decided not to address contentious bilateral issues such as border maps, has one project designed to demonstrate that he is in fact the leader of a sovereign nation whose primary task in New Delhi is to negotiate a deal from which both countries will benefit. So this time the Pancheshwor Hydropower Project occupies chief place on the official agenda. The prime minister will attempt to bring to life a project agreed upon in 1996 but never implemented, his office says. Broad political agreement will be reached to do so. Everyone knows, not least the prime minister himself, that the likelihood of an agreement emerging in the next few days is extremely slim. Nonetheless, negotiations matter in themselves: through negotiations can be gained the appearance of parity.

The creation of weakness


“When we engage with Indians we feel that we are dealing with a system, whereas when Indians engage with us they feel they are dealing with individuals.” Two separate people made this remark within a period of half an hour at a recent reception where the main topic of conversation was the prime minister’s imminent visit to India. These individuals, both with extensive diplomatic knowledge and experience, had been asked what they thought were the main weaknesses of Nepal’s handling of Indian policy. 


Nepal’s political system lacks institutionalization and the political class is unable to project a coherent, unanimous face to outsiders. Instead, our politicians seek to actively cultivate New Delhi in their efforts to bring down domestic political rivals. India has worked hard to create these conditions. It feels it is in its interests to have a fractured and weak political landscape in Nepal. This enables it to penetrate Nepal’s internal politics so deeply that it is not only able to play one party against another, but also members of one political party against other members of the same party. India thus prefers to deal with Nepal’s politicians as individuals, not as a collectivity representing a nation.
During his visit to New Delhi, Madhav Nepal will no doubt feel grateful for the support he will receive. But his gratitude will likely be mixed with resentment: he will find it difficult to forget the role that the Indian establishment played in weakening his party — the CPN-UML — in the 1990s. 


Among the various reasons for the UML’s slide into ineffectuality, most of them domestic, India’s role looms large. India began by cultivating access with UML leaders — who at that time were still feared as firebrand communists — in the early 1990s. Throughout the decade, India made many efforts — of propaganda, coercion and isolation — to tame leaders with a penchant for revolutionary posturing. Eventually, in 1998, India contributed to engineering a split in the party, which led to the formation the CPN (Marxist-Leninist) led by Bam Dev Gautam. Although the parties eventually reunified, the split caused irreparable harm to the party. In the short term, it led to the UML’s extremely poor performance in the 1999 elections. In the longer term, the split made many left activists become severely disillusioned with what they perceived as the UML’s excessive subordination to India. Many of those in Gautam’s CPN(ML) jumped ship to join the Maoists. The Maoists replaced the UML as the party of choice for many other young leftists. 


The Indian establishment is now involved in an effort to do to the Maoists what was done to the UML in the 1990s. At the moment the hope appears to be that keeping the Maoists out of government indefinitely and refusing to grant them any concessions, will exacerbate divisions within the party. This will also increase the Maoist antagonism towards other political parties. When suitable conditions emerge for a Maoist re-entry into government — such as when Delhi feels that the party has become sufficiently aware of and pliant to Indian power — the Indian establishment will work to engineer a political coalition in which the Maoists may take the lead. 


The Maoists understand that they overplayed their hand in their dealings with India while they were in government and will have to demonstrate greater compliance in the future. But the long-term danger is that they will become too compliant, allow Indian penetration into their party and use India to undermine their domestic political rivals. All of which would undermine internal cohesion and weaken the political organization they have spent much effort in building over the past decade.